Maleku

The Maleku, called Guatuso by the Spanish, are a Chibchan-speaking people of Costa Rica's forested Río Frío plains. Their pre-contact territory took in the sacred slopes of Arenal and the Río Celeste, and their open-walled, palm-thatched palenques were shared by related families. Kin to the Rama, they may also carry the traditions of other peoples and of Huetar refugees from the Spanish conquest.

Franciscan friars probed the rivers alone: by 1719 the Maleku were known as the warrior Indians of Río Frío, and in 1750 Francisco Zepeda counted five hundred ranchos on streams feeding the San Juan.

When Tomás López entered in 1778 his party was driven back by arrows, and Maleku oral tradition remembers a priest captured on the Río La Muerte and put to death. At the end of the colonial era the Guatuso plains remained outside Spanish control.